About this artwork

Count Ugolino appears in Dante's 'Inferno' Canto XXXIII. He is imprisoned with his two sons and grandsons and they beg him to feed off their flesh to keep himself alive. They die one by one and at last Ugolino gives in to the terrible temptation of hunger. The subject was very popular with artists in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was most famously depicted by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Henry Fuseli. Rodin, however, chose to concentrate purely on the anguish of the central character in his bronze.

Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin

Despite difficult beginnings and the repeated rejection of his work by the Paris Salon, Rodin persevered to become one of the most famous sculptors in history. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, he left Paris for Brussels, but it was a trip to Italy in 1876 that…